Anne McCue, Angela Perley a potent double bill

jaymiller

Sunday

Aug 5, 2018 at 5:07 AMAug 5, 2018 at 6:42 AM

While we're all spinning between stadiums, ballparks, and major music venues this month, the Narrows Center in Fall River snuck in a dazzling doubleheader on Saturday night, featuring two of the most exciting female rock talents in the country.

Saturday's lineup had Australian singer/guitarist Anne McCue, fronting her trio, and Columbus, Ohio's Angela Perley and the Howling Moons, and both acts played more than an hour each, and both groups earned standing ovations from the small crowd.

Anne McCue is a Sydney native whose college degrees were in making movies, but she became more and more enthralled with music after graduation. McCue's most recent album, 2015's “Blue Sky Thinking,” found her exploring some of the pre-rock roots she'd come to love, including swing and the guitar styles of Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. Saturday night's 11-song set included some folk-rock, blues-rock, 1930's style swing, traditional country-blues, and fiery rock, as McCue alternated between electric and acoustic guitars, and lap steel on one number.

McCue is also a songwriter with a rare touch, as her opening song proved. “Stupid” is one of her older songs, and one she said was inspired by Bob Dylan and The Byrds, and it is mostly a tune about the difficulty of writing a good song, with the line “I wanted to write a Bob Dylan song.” But, delivered as an easy rolling folk-rocker last night, it's good humor was enhanced by McCue's stunning fretwork. She introduced another song as “film noir in East L.A.,” and noted that it was penned with Humphrey Bogart in mind, and “Driving Down Alvarado” was surely a dark and moody rocker, where a damsel runs into the wrong company, all impressions heightened by McCue's weirdly hypnotic guitar solo.

The 1930's style swing tune was “The Devil in the Middle,” (which is a duet with Dave Alvin on the recent record), and with a refrain that had the audience singing “Hi-Dee-Hi” along with her, McCue sang humorous verses resolving in the chorus “Daddy don't rock, Mama don't roll, The Devil's in the middle, And he wants your soul..” McCue noted that Confucius inspired another song, as “Dig Two Graves” was the philosopher's advice to anyone seeking revenge, and that was another '30s style tune, a bit more bluesy, with jaunty acoustic guitar.

McCue turned her talents to lap steel for “Hangman,” a tune she ruefully admitted she'd written about the Ku Klux Klan in 2004, never thinking they'd be still around by 2018. The lap steel provided haunting wails as she sang that country-blues style number. A more gritty, electric blues sound permeated “Mama, She Makes the World Turn 'Round.” And McCue and her band–Josh Kiggans on drums and Matt Murphy on bass–turned “Hellfire Raiser” into as blazing and ornery a piece of blues-rocking fire as anyone's likely to hear this summer.

McCue made Tom Waits' “Downtown” into a pulsating, midtempo rocker that nonetheless let the bard's rich lyric lines ring out sharply. Murphy took up acoustic bass for a marvelously limber “Little White Cat,” a tune where McCue has the opposite of a black cat cross her path, and it was such a brightly swinging affair it almost seemed like–to continue that feline theme–the Stray Cats. McCue and her trio came back for an encore, the swampy, midtempo rocker “Nobody's Sleeping,” where once again her songwriting and vocal skills were only a little bit overshadowed by her immense skill on the electric guitar.

Angela Perley and the Howling Moons squeezed 11 songs into their 70-minute set, and while the singer/songwriter plays rhythm guitar, Howling Moons lead guitarist Chris Connor is clearly a monster on the axe, and a master of assorted effects pedals. We haven't heard so much canny use of wah-wah and reverb since “Crimson and Clover,” with arrangements lending all of Perley's songs a psychedelic aura. Had this band debuted in about 1967, they'd have been huge.

Perley graduated from Ohio University in 2008, and soon put her English degree to good use writing songs. She's got a nicely keening, alto voice and writes lines that frame love and life in unique ways, and she delivers it all with palpable emotion. And by the way, she plays some amazing bowed saw, mimicking pedal steel or, as one fan suggested “Who needs a theremin?” (to which Perley replied “I'm the acoustic theremin.”).

Wearing a yellow tee shirt, red and black floral patterned jeans, hair down almost to her guitar, and a big Western hat, Perley looked every inch the psychedelic rock singer. A song that seemed to be titled “Can't You Tell?” was all surging rocker, yet Connor's guitar accents still gave it a country feel. The shuffle-rock of “18” morphed into one of the best guitar solos we've heard this year, as Connor coaxed the melody into all sorts of wild and unexpected areas. The new song “4:30” was a slower ballad, which gave Connor and Perley a chance to both play shimmering tones that floated over the room.

But Perley and her crew can handle gritty straightahead rockers, as “White Doves” proved. “He Rides” was like a mysterious midnight stroll, with a Western atrmosphere. In the sub-genre of 60s-flavored garage rockers, few tunes could top “Green Eyes,” which worked off the wonderful contrast between the take-no-prisoners guitars, and Perley's sweet crooning “Give me green eyes in the morning, baby, Sunshine in my heart..”

The set ended with “Athens,” a song Perley wrote to salute the community where she believes she really found her avocation as an artist. That song was a gently melodic country-rocker, which took a side trip via surreal sound effects from Perley's common wood saw, bowed expertly by her to produce a melody, and more of Connor's stellar guitar hero-with-lots-of-pedals work.

Between Connors and McCue, fans left the Narrows Center convinced they'd just heard two of the best and most versatile six-string virtuosos anywhere. And Perley and McCue are also outstanding songwriters, so this show (a $20 advance ticket) was the bargain of the summer.

Narrows Center general manager Patrick Norton noted that, despite the busy summer schedules all over the area, the Fall River venue enjoyed its most successful month ever in July, with several shows like bluesman Walter Trout, and the Outlaws last Thursday, packing the place with its new, expanded 430-capacity.

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